The attempted modernization of Central Asia by the central Soviet government in the 1920's was a dramatic confrontation between radical, determined, authoritarian communists and a cluster of traditional Moslem societies based on kinship, custom, and religion. The Soviet authorities were determined to undermine the traditional social order through the destruction of existing family structures and worked to achieve this aspect of revolution through the mobilization of women. Gregory J. Massell's study of the interaction between central power and local traditions concentrates on the development of female roles in revolutionary modernization. Women in Moslem societies were segregated, exploited, and degraded; they were, therefore, a structural weak point in the traditional order—a surrogate proletariat. Through this potentially subversive group, it was believed, intense conflicts could be generated within society which would lead to its disintegration and subsequent reconstitution. The first part of the book isolates the trends that made Central Asia vulnerable to outside intervention, and examines the factors that impelled the communist elites to turn to Moslem women as potential revolutionary allies. In the second part, Professor Massed analyzes Soviet perceptions of female inferiority and of the revolutionary potential of Moslem women. Part Three is an account of specific Soviet actions based on these assumptions. The fourth part of the book deals with the variety of responses these actions evoked. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Since Central Asia is generally considered to be the 'forgetten world' of the former Soviet Union, Central Asian women constitute the 'lost voices' within those regions. Corcoran-Nantes considers how the shift to Western capatalist ideals has affected gender relations in the region. While the uneasy synthesis between socialism and Islam under the Soviet regime offered many women considerable status and personal freedom these gains have been rapidly eroded by 'democrazation.' Corcoran-Nantes shows that the main threat to the socio-political status of women in Central Asia is not Islamic fundamentalism, but the imopsitino of free market principles and Western 'liberal democratic' ideals. As a special consultant to UNESCAP, the author was one of the first researchers to undertake substantial research into the lives of women in the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the post independence period. This book offers a unique insight into the dynamics of independence for these three republics at a time when few people had the access to the region.

Drawing on such diverse sources as propaganda art, the trade union press, workers' memoirs, and materials in recently opened Soviet archives, this is the first book to examine the shifting identity of the "working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies. New essays by fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts to make them Soviet. Initial chapters consider power relations and working-class identity in imperial Russia. The effects of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 on labor relations among printers and coal miners are then discussed. Addressing subsequent decades, other essays document the situation of cotton workers and white-collar workers embroiled within the ambiguities of the New Economic Policy or challenge the appropriateness of "class" analysis for the Stalin era. Additional chapters reconstruct workers' responses to the Great Purges and trace the significance of class in visual and verbal discourse. Making Workers Soviet will be central to the current rethinking of Soviet history and of class formation in noncapitalist settings.

Family, Law and Politics, Volume II of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, brings together over 360 entries on women, family, law, politics, and Islamic cultures around the world.

Resistance has become an important and controversial analytical category for the study of Stalinism. The opening of Soviet archives allows historians an unprecedented look at the fabric of state and society in the 1930s. Researchers long spellbound by myths of Russian fatalism and submission as well as by the very real powers of the Stalinist state are startled by the dimensions of popular resistance under Stalin.Narratives of such resistance are inherently interesting, yet the topic is also significant because it sheds light on its historical surroundings. Contending with Stalinism employs the idea of resistance as a tool to explore what otherwise would remain opaque features of the social, cultural, and political history of the 1930s. In the process, the authors reveal a semi-autonomous world residing within and beyond the official world of Stalinism. Resistance ranged across a spectrum from violent strikes to the passive resistance that was a virtual way of life for millions and took many forms, from foot dragging and negligence to feigned ignorance and false compliance. Contending with Stalinism also highlights the problematic nature of resistance as an analytical category and stresses the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon. The topics addressed include working-class strikes, peasant rebellions, black-market crimes, official corruption, and homosexual and ethnic subcultures.

On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation? Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity. Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

Women from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe—what used to be called the Second World—once dominated women’s activism at the United Nations, but their contributions have been largely forgotten or deemed insignificant in comparison with those of Western feminists. In Second World, Second Sex Kristen Ghodsee rescues some of this lost history by tracing the activism of Eastern European and African women during the 1975 United Nations International Year of Women and the subsequent Decade for Women (1976-1985). Focusing on case studies of state socialist Bulgaria and nonaligned but socialist-leaning Zambia, Ghodsee examines the feminist networks that developed between the Second and Third Worlds and shows how alliances between socialist women challenged American women’s leadership of the global women’s movement. Drawing on interviews and archival research across three continents, Ghodsee argues that international ideological competition between capitalism and socialism profoundly shaped the world women inhabit today.

One of the few English language studies to focus on the male experiences, this book addresses the important questions raised by the rise and fall of the Soviet experiment in transforming gender relations. Issues covered include; * the paternal role * women as breadwinners * men's loss of status at work * changing gender roles in the press * the relationship between the sexual and gender revoloutions. Featuring an outstanding panel of Russian contributors, this collection is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Politics, Gender Studies and Russian Studies.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

Stephen H. Norwood has written the first systematic study of the American far left's role in both propagating and combating antisemitism. This book covers Communists from 1920 onward, Trotskyists, the New Left and its black nationalist allies, and the contemporary remnants of the New Left. Professor Norwood analyzes the deficiencies of the American far left's explanations of Nazism and the Holocaust. He explores far left approaches to militant Islam, from condemnation of its fierce antisemitism in the 1930s to recent apologies for jihad. Norwood discusses the far left's use of long-standing theological and economic antisemitic stereotypes that the far right also embraced. The study analyzes the far left's antipathy to Jewish culture, as well as its occasional efforts to promote it. He considers how early Marxist and Bolshevik paradigms continued to shape American far left views of Jewish identity, Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism.